World examines "impossible" goal to halt extinctions

OSLO (Reuters) - World leaders will next week consider a target for halting extinctions of animals and plants by 2020 that many experts rate impossibly ambitious given mounting threats such as climate change and loss of habitats.

"Biodiversity losses are accelerating," said Anne Larigauderie, executive director of the Paris-based Diversitas Secretariat, which groups international scientists and reckons the goal laid out in a draft U.N. plan is out of reach for 2020.

At the United Nations headquarters in New York on September 22, nations will discuss how to protect the diversity of plants and animals -- vital to everything from food to fresh water -- after failing to reach a goal set in 2002 of a "significant reduction" in losses by 2010.

The world has made some progress since 2002, such as in expanding protected areas for wildlife. But U.N. studies say extinction rates are running up to 1,000 times higher than those inferred from fossil records in the worst crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

Larigauderie said scientists had been largely left out of defining new goals. "Until we have an organised process we will continue to have these sort of feel-good objectives that we are going to miss again," she said of halting losses by 2020.

A draft U.N. strategic plan for 2020, to be formally adopted at U.N. talks in Japan in October, calls for "effective and urgent action" either "to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2020" or "towards halting the loss of biodiversity" with no deadline.

IMMENSE STRUGGLE

"Our goal has to be to halt the loss of biodiversity," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme.
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